I had always dreamt of a job in web design and development as it was a hobby of mine in which I had taught myself some very basic HTML and CSS and was keen to progress (and still am) to PHP, MySQL and beyond.

So I received a call one day from a friend saying that she knew of a web design company who were looking for new team members. A week after going for an interview with the company director, I began working with the “Not Web Design” team in Salobreña on the southern coast of Spain. I quickly found out that every project they work on is powered by the Joomla! content management system and they had even developed software designed to help other developers use Joomla! I’d heard a few things previously about Joomla! and I couldn´t really understand why a team of professional developers would want to use something which I thought would be so restricting.

After half of my first day at work, I was completely converted. I find that Joomla! not only speeds up a lot of those usually very time consuming tasks, it also simplifies the way the development process works and most importantly, leaves all the power in the developers hands.

We have recently been working on an online dating web site for some clients and have (of course) been working with Joomla! The way we have been able to integrate all the Joomla! functions which we have chosen to use but create custom components and modules when needed has been great.

I am still very much a beginner in this business but the team I work with are unbelievably advanced. Joomla! does everything they need a CMS to do, without stepping on their toes.

I would recommend Joomla! to anybody wanting to learn to build websites!

We have just completed a new Joomla 1.6 component creator that we intend to release when Joomla 1.6 is made public. It will probably replace our current component creator. While developing it I have stumbled over a few bugs in the upcoming 1.6 and have reported them all. This one however is not really a bug, but it is still bugging me so I vent through our blog instead. As a Joomla 3rd party developer, I have been confused many times between the word “Preferences” and “Config”. You see the term interchanged throughout the Joomla documentation and framework. In 1.6 there is an new kid on the block that one would hope helps clear things up: “Options”. But sadly “Options” is just here to make everything even more confusing. Take a look at this example:

JToolBarHelper::preferences('com_component'); 

The above code use the phrase “preferences” to load a button that says “options“. The default values for the preferences (or options?) are set in a file called config.xml. This is just one of many many examples of this. It is all over the code, documentation and the forums.Maybe it is time for Joomla to make a choice and stick with it?

Update: We are very busy with a large web site with a hard deadline to the release of the 1.6 component creator is going to take a while.

Great news for all Joomla developers!

After developing a few custom components for our clients, we realized just how long and time-consuming it can be, just to create all the files necessary to make a new Joomla 1.5 component, following the MVC standards. Immediately, we realized that a lot of this process was very tedious and repetitive and could be automated if only somebody created some software that did this for the developer… and so we did!

We have created the Joomla Component Creator - which has already saved us hours of development time -  and decided to share it with you all.

The Joomla Component Creator creates all the files necessary; views, helpers, controller, etc. as well as creating all the necessary, appropriately named classes and also version, author and licensing information in the header comment of all the files.

We have already had lots of people trying this tool out for themselves and already a good amount of positive feedback. We hope you like it and it saves as much time for you as it has done for us! If you like it, we would appreciate your reviews.

Just another quick little note to let readers know that we have just finished a Joomla component that can successfully download and maintain an updated local database version of the brilliant location data found at http://www.geonames.org it is not stable enough for us to release it but we can use it as a foundation for building similar applications. So don’t hesitate to contact us if you need to implement Geonames data on your own web site. Especially if it is a Joomla web site.

Creating the import was quite complicated as all the geonames files are zipped CSV files so we needed to program an application that could doanload, unzip and try to convert the data into database inserts. After much swearing and long evenings we have managed to come up with a very robust solution.

Just a quick post to let the world know that we have experience developing and applying the booking.com xml interface into a Joomla component that downloads and updates a local database of all the hotels.

It is quite a task as booking.com only allows you to download 1000 records at a time from up to 15 different feeds per hotel (There are more than 50.000 hotels).

Please contact us if you need a similar solution. We have the experience!

We recently developed a site where we are using the excellent Joomla component Mosets Tree (version 2.0.2). To generate SEF URLs for the site, we are using the sh404SEF component as JoomSEF doesn’t play as nice out of the box.

However, when using sh404SEF there are a couple of issues, most noticeably the fact that status alerts (such as the “Listing submitted successfully! or “Your review is pending approval.” messages that appear when the user submits/rates/reviews/etc. something in the directory) do not appear. This is obviously bad for the user as they don’t get any feedback on whatever action they have just performed.

Luckily, there is a way to fix this that’s not too complicated …

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